Three quarters of Australian businesses to use in-house IT in the future: Ovum

When looking at the future of IT in business, 75 per cent of CIOs expect their IT activities to be doable through in-house owned IT operations.

Ovum APAC IT research director, Steve Hodgkinson, highlighted the observation from a local survey at CeBIT 2013 in Sydney, with Cloud services currently occupying a “micro-niche” at approximately four per cent.

“Most of them see their IT being predominantly in-house,” he said.

Hodgkinson admits this results is surprising, but this is the “reality of the legacy that we have” and the way IT has been managed over the last decade.

Core pain points and challenges for CIOs revolve around removing that legacy and modernising the core of business systems.

This also extends to people and skills within the organisation, and the ability to “attract the right people to do the things they want to do.”

Despite all of the hype around the Cloud, Hodgkinson said the trend up to now been towards in-house.

“Because of that, most of the focus has been about how to shift that in-house infrastructure, with all of its complexity and integration issues,” he said.

What worries Hodgkinson the most about Cloud adoption is a term he coined a few years ago called “proliferative innovation.”

“Before, it was small number of large chunks of IT, with decisions about those made by executives under professional governance,” he said.

“The way things are today, it is completely different picture, with a very large number of small devices and decision about those devices primarily in the hands of consumers and employees.”

Ball and chain

While Hodgkinson characterises the Cloud as “one of these big conversations that has gone on and on,” he said it is very much a key conversation today.

The big issue he sees underlying this big discussion is speed.

“[The Cloud] is often talked about in terms of agility,” he said.

By this, Hodgkinson is referring to businesses and the Government being worried about “getting their work done decisively” and “doing things more quickly.”

“The big problem is that IT has an image of being a ball and chain around the leg, because of the complexity, security, compliance and cost,” he said.

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